Sherri Shepherd: I'm No Brainiac But I Know the Earth is Round

The View co-host Sherri Shepherd is shooting straight to the top: A fan favorite on the daily talk show, she has a starring role on Lifetime’s Sherri, plays Tracy Morgan‘s wife on 30 Rock and is releasing a self-help book, “Permission Slips”, but she almost lost it all when she admitted on the show she didn’t know that the earth was round.

“We were discussing creationism versus evolution, and Barbara [Walters] asked if I thought the Earth was round or flat,” Sherri tellsNew York magazine of her September 2007 debut on The View.

“It was just everything coming at me at once, like I was hearing things underwater, and I said, ‘I don’t know, I’m just trying to take care of my son!’

“At the end of the show, Barbara goes, ‘Sherri, dear, the earth is round.’ I knew that!”

That same night, Sherri had become the second most Googled person in the country. “People hated me,” she cries.

So what went wrong? “I think people expected me to be another Star [Jones], a brainiac with forceful opinions, but that’s not what I brought,” Sherri explains.

“When Joy [Behar] said ‘bi-partisan’ for the first time, I was like, ‘What the heck is that? Is that a French word?’ I didn’t know anything about politics, and I wasn’t afraid to say I was just learning. I think people like that I’m real.”

Now starring in a show loosely based on her life (Sherri’s ex-husband Jeff Tarpley left her for another woman who was pregnant with his child) the 42-year-old explains that filming provides daily therapy.

“Every week on Sherri, I have to look at the actress who plays the woman my husband got pregnant, and say, ‘I wanted a family, and you messed it up, but I gotta learn to get over it,’” she says.

“I can’t keep hating that woman, because that doesn’t do anybody any good.”